Photo: Dennis P. Mong Jr./Paramount+
In last week’s Mayor of Kingstown, the immediate danger posed by a huge supply of poisoned dope pushed some of season three’s major villains to the sidelines. In this week’s episode, the bad guys make their presence known with authority. The Russian mob boss Konstantin and the Aryan prison gang leader Merle have been operating in Kingstown for days, under Mike’s nose but out of his view. Well, now that the overdose crisis has faded and Mike has a chance to breathe, he can finally catch a whiff of the foulness in the air.
“Barbarians at the Gate” is a bit of a reset episode — necessary to keep the season’s various subplots moving, though less exciting overall than last week’s “Guts.” It’s notable primarily for how thoroughly it maps out the mess that Kingstown has become ever since the big prison riot at the end of season one.
For one thing, before we even get to Merle and Konstantin, we need to talk about a couple of the barbarians already inside the gate — starting with Robert Sawyer, who returned suspiciously quickly from being hospitalized in the season-two finale. In the season-three premiere, he turned a simple muscle-flexing raid on an Aryan compound into a horrifying inferno; and that all-too-typical bit of overkill has put him back on ADA Evelyn Foley’s Kingstown Rotten Apples list. She’s been ranting about Sawyer to everyone who’ll listen in the local justice department — to the point where Mike overhears her yelling and mutters to Ferguson, “She’s gotta shut up.” Alas, even though Mike urges her — warns her, even — to “let it be over,” Evelyn is determined to reopen the investigation into who killed Ben Morrissey, the former SWAT team member who had been an informant against Sawyer.
Mike also may not fully realize the problem that Bunny is threatening to become. Even though he asked for this help last week, Bunny’s unhappy that Mike worked directly with Raphael to get the prison’s Crips gang a new (and more expensive) drug supplier. The current wary detente between Bunny and the Kingstown PD could crumble at any time, and if Mike has lost the Crips’ confidence, he’s not going to be able to mitigate it.
For now, Bunny is still enough on Mike’s side to warn him about Merle — something Kareem hadn’t bothered to do. When Mike drops by the prison to check out the surveillance footage of Sharon’s murder from last week’s episode (annoying Kareem, who didn’t give him the permission to snoop), Mike takes the opportunity to snap at the warden for failing to keep him informed about all the latest news inside. When Kareem snaps back, “I don’t report to you,” Mike reminds him that they know damaging secrets about each other and that it’d be best for them to work together. Kareem continues to insist — and not wrongly, in my opinion — that he’s better off handling his own business.
As for the icy Aryan Merle Callahan, it turns out he and Kareem are old acquaintances. In this episode, we don’t yet discover Merle’s whole deal, but we do learn that he left behind a cushy setup at the lower-security Millhaven prison, where he was a trusty and had the run of the library. He made the choice to get transferred to the main Kingstown facility because of how far the Aryan gangs have fallen lately. This will be his legacy: wresting control of the disgraceful situation at Kingstown, then dying on his own terms.
The scene between Kareem and Merle makes for some terrific theater, with Michael Beach and Richard Brake passive-aggressively threatening each other in low voices. Brake is especially unsettling as Merle, who quotes the Bible and quietly, calmly suggests he has a higher calling. “Amor fati” he says to Kareem, allying himself with Nietzsche’s philosophy that a great man must be happily resigned to his fate.
“Amor fati” is one of two foreign terms uttered by Mike’s enemies in this episode. The other comes via Konstantin Noskov, who in his first meeting with Mike disdainfully refers to him as the “patsani” — or “boy” — of the local Russian mob’s previous boss, Milo. This happens right after Tatiana’s corpse is discovered in a rat-infested dumpster (right next to her baby, who is barely still alive), which so enrages Mike that he comes rushing into the Russians’ lair, beating up henchmen and yelling at Konstantin, making an erratic first impression. To be fair, with Iris still missing, Mike is concerned that the Russians have rubbed her out; and so he lets his emotions get the better of him.
Iris is later found, still locked up from last episode’s traffic stop and refusing to give the cops her fingerprints. And it happens, she does know Konstantin. (She once helped him beat a murder charge in New York by “dating” the judge.) But for the moment, she’s still off the grid, mob-wise.
Mike, however, is now squarely in their sights. After he kills a Russian goon who engages him in a high-speed car chase, Mike shows up for another unscheduled meeting with Konstantin, where he tries to explain to the new guy that the McCluskys are untouchable in Kingstown. Konstantin pontificates at one point that “animals lead with cock or claw,” but Mike lets him know that he’s “not the kind of animal you put down.”
So, with all these foreign words and loaded phrases flying around, can everybody understand each other? Given that this episode ends with a fleet of police cars blowing up in the KPD parking lot, maybe not. But who’s making the statement here: the Russians, the Aryans, the Crips … or somebody who, up until now, has been lurking silently?
• Mike constantly reminds everyone that what happens inside Kingstown’s prisons “echoes on the outside.” So it’s not good news for him that one of Konstantin’s lackeys is seen paying a visit to Merle in the middle of this episode. If these two start coordinating their operations on both sides of the wall, Kingstown will be in even more trouble than usual.
• Detective Ian Ferguson gets a lot of screen time in this episode, making moves even Mike doesn’t know about. With the heat back on Sawyer, Ferguson pays a “remember to keep cool” visit to Charlie Pickings (Kenny Johnson), the serial killer he employed to get rid of Morrissey last season. Later, Ferguson takes a peek in Iris’s police file and promises to quietly bury what he finds there — which is something apparently so disturbing that she’d rather Mike never find out. Ferguson is also the subject of a telling aside between Mike and his secretary, Rebecca. When he tries to get her to start calling this creepy cop “Ian” instead of “Detective Ferguson,” she icily replies, “I prefer not to.”
• Meanwhile, just before the episode’s climactic explosions, Ferguson is leaving work and in the middle of a wild conversation with his buddies about something he read once, which said Mother Teresa was unpleasant to be around. When he’s told it’s uncool to “call Mother Teresa a bitch,” he stresses, “I’m not saying it, I just fucking read it.”
